


People Trafficking

by PDB11



Category: Kleiner Werwolf | Young Werewolf - Cornelia Funke, Support Group - Catherine Jinks
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Crime Fighting, Fights, Gen, Germany, Non-Sexual Slavery, Pre-Relationship, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:01:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 14,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27723196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PDB11/pseuds/PDB11
Summary: Motte and Lina (fromKleiner Werwolf), twenty years after Motte's first werewolf experience, team up to break a werewolf fighting ring (fromAbused Werewolf Rescue Group)
Relationships: Balthasar Schielmann/Amelie Pruschke, Motte Schultze & Lina Herrmann





	1. Chapter 1

Send!

Moritz Schultze enjoyed his job at the bank. One perk, he mused as he walked to the coffee machine, was the seventeenth-floor office with a view over half of Frankfurt. But sometimes someone had to do the dirty work.

In his case, it was the project to audit some large far-eastern companies on working conditions in their factories. The investors demanded this more and more, nowadays. Of course there were any number of organisations that did this, and published league tables, with more detailed data available to those, like the bank, who could pay; but in the end someone had to go out to Bangkok and actually visit the places, and this time it had been Moritz.

But the report was finished, and he had finally sent it to the director for approval. At least his boss wasn’t one of those who wanted changes every time he looked at a report, even when they’d agreed all the changes on the previous occasion – or several occasions, as with his first boss. Now at last he could relax, briefly, until the next job came in. He carried the coffee cup back to his office and stood by the window, sipping it and watching the boats on the river below.

The phone rang.

Already? He’d thought he’d have at least until the end of the coffee. He picked it up. ‘Schultze?’ he said curtly.

‘Motte? Is that you?’ said a female voice, tentatively. Who could that be? Nobody still called him Motte except his family – Father and Paul, that was. His mother had never called him anything but Moritz, in full.

The penny dropped. ‘Lina? To what do I owe this honour?’ Lina Herrmann had been his childhood sweetheart, he supposed – friends ever since they could remember, the only children of their age in the apartment block where they had lived, in the same class at school – though there had never been anything romantic about their relationship. They had drifted apart as teenagers, as she had got more and more involved in activism and he in horror fiction, and had hardly spoken since she went off to Munich to study engineering. The last he’d heard, she’d been working for a charity offering low-tech engineering solutions for developing countries.

‘Motte? I need your help.’

‘What sort of help? If you need money to manufacture your latest micro-generator, you need to speak to our corporate finance team.’

‘Micro-generator? What on earth are you talking about? Oh, you mean my old job. No, I’ve got a new job now. People trafficking.’

‘What?! I thought for a moment you meant _you_ were smuggling people. But why do you need my help tackling people traffickers? Anyway, you’re an engineer. What are you doing getting involved in that anyway?’

‘Last year. I was looking to move on, and this charity wanted someone to work on technical solutions to track the movements of traffickers – and their cargoes – around Europe. I got the job. But this one is weird. I don’t think anyone at the charity even thinks it’s real.’

‘Why ever not? They seem to find trafficking all over the place, where no one else would think to look, don’t they?’

‘Yes, but it’s werewolves.’

‘Pull the other one!’

‘Seriously, Motte. Why do you think I need your help?’

‘If this is your idea of a joke, Lina …’

‘Look, I’m serious. Hey, I’m in Frankfurt this week. How about we meet at the café opposite the cinema. You know, where we used to go and see the small, independent films. The cinema’s shut now – I think it’s a bingo hall or something – but the café is still there, and does really good _Brezen_. The best I’ve tasted outside Bavaria.’

Moritz knew that Lina couldn’t be stopped once she had an idea like this. If he turned her away now, she’d find some way of pestering him for weeks. ‘Okay. I’ve just finished a job, so I shouldn’t need to work late tonight. Meet there at six thirty?’

*

So it was that at half past six they were sitting at a table in a coffee shop in a part of town he hadn’t visited for at least a decade, drinking coffee and munching on pastries – she on a very large, very cheesy pretzel, he on a shortbread confection called a flaming heart, which he remembered from childhood treats but hadn’t eaten for years.

‘If it really is werewolves, I can see why you came to me. But we read up on it at the time. Either you turn into a wolf permanently, or you recover. What’s it got to do with people trafficking?’

‘There’s another sort of werewolf,’ she explained. ‘I think the mutation emerged in Spain or Portugal. These people turn into a wolf for one night, _every_ full moon. And most of them go totally berserk when they do.

‘There’s a group – highly secret, of course – of rich, ethically deficient individuals who hunt down these people, hold them captive, and make them fight each other every month. If they can’t find two werewolves to fight, they make them fight other creatures. Often dogs, occasionally humans. If it’s werewolf versus human, the human doesn’t stand a chance. Dogs don’t fare much better. It’s horrible!’

‘Have you seen this?’

‘No, thank God. It’s mostly in North America. There was an Australian group, too, but that got broken up a few years ago. Nobody’s quite sure how. But they’re trying to start one in Germany.’

‘Shit.’ There wasn’t much else he could say. And he thought he knew where this was heading. ‘Tell me the worst.’

‘Amelie Schielmann put me onto it. It seems old Faulwetter is involved – he’s told them where they can find some werewolves in the forests of Thuringia. But we’ve got to stop it.’

It would have to be Faulwetter. He had been a teacher at their school, but had been sacked when they’d been studying for the _Abitur_ , some scandal about photographing students. Of course! Why had he never made the connection? Faulwetter had tried to photograph Moritz in the process of turning into a wolf all those years ago.

‘So, what do you want me to do?’

‘It depends. How wolfish are you feeling?’


	2. Chapter 2

Full moon was not for nearly three weeks, which gave them time to plan. Which was a lot more planning than Lina’s crazy schemes used to get when they were children. But then, this was a lot crazier.

There was, unsurprisingly, nothing on lycanthropy in the regular scientific journals. The internet, however, is large, and most things can be found on it somewhere. The difficulty was separating the wheat from the chaff, and this was where Moritz’s skills from his job at the bank came into their own. The fake papers on lycanthropy were a lot more blatant than some of the equally fake corporate reports he would review in support of an investment decision.

The real gem that Moritz discovered was a couple of papers by an Australian doctor, Plackett. The first dealt almost exclusively with what they were coming to call Spanish lycanthropy, but the second, co-authored by a man named Schneider, set out the differences between Spanish and German werewolves, and gave a lot of useful information on the progress of the condition. On the other hand, neither he nor Lina would have been able to make it past the medical jargon, he mused, when they were eleven, and Motte had actually needed it. Reading between the lines, Schneider seemed to have the Spanish form of lycanthropy, but had travelled to Thuringia to research the German form in the hope that it might help him and his fellow sufferers. Moritz even managed to get an e-mail response from Dr Plackett, saying that he was unable to travel due to a medical condition, but he could certainly send someone to help them with the werewolves, if they rescued any.

Lina, meanwhile, dug up more information on the smuggling ring. They were not yet well established in Germany, which was an advantage, because the German participants were not used to the secrecy required. They also seemed to be seeking patrons who would pay to watch the fights, which in itself created an opening to find out about them. There was enough evidence that they actually had a werewolf that Moritz e-mailed Dr Plackett again and they agreed that a friend of his, a retired priest named Alvarez, would fly to Germany for the operation.

Moritz would have favoured posing as a director of the bank, rich enough for them to court him as a customer. He knew his boss’s job well enough that he could play the part, anyway. But Lina had other ideas, and as usual, she won.

*

Two weeks later, Motte – he couldn’t think of himself as Moritz in wolf shape – was padding across a carpet of leaves deep in a wood. This wasn’t wild forest – Motte had never seen wild forest, but the wolf in him knew what it ought to be like – but a huge tract of woodland slightly less intensively managed than places _not_ designated ‘Naturpark’.

After first being bitten, Motte had always been able to sense the wolf in him, but this was the first time he had let it come to the fore and take over his body. It was his experience of being a wolf as a child that had led to his becoming a vegetarian, and everything they had read still stressed the danger of eating meat. At least this time, Lina had let him stock up on dog biscuits, instead of teasing him about them. But the smell of small animals was everywhere, and threatened to overwhelm his purpose.

 _No_ , he told himself. _Remember the rabbit? You’ll chase one down, catch it, and then feel too sorry for it to eat it. Besides, no meat!_ It helped that he still had his human wit, and wasn’t reduced to thinking like a wild animal.

As far as Lina could determine – he hadn’t asked how she found this out – Faulwetter had identified this wood as one with werewolves in it. The traffickers had made a base in a village called Wilhelmsdorf, where they planned to round up some wolves and see which ones appeared to be weres. He wasn’t sure how they could tell with German werewolves, but Plackett and Schneider’s research suggested it was possible. They were sure to pick Motte: a wolf who actually approached them would be suspect from the start, and if he turned back into a human in the morning there would be no doubt about it.

Motte still wasn’t happy about deliberately getting himself caught. He didn’t care what Lina said about having the element of surprise. No matter how unlikely it was that an untrained werewolf would have avoided getting stuck in wolf form, once they saw Motte change back they would know that he could, and the surprise would be lost.

Motte’s plan (which he hadn’t told to Lina) was not to change back. He knew he could do this, and unlike when he was newly-bitten, it carried little risk of becoming permanent. He would save the surprise until he had a chance to do something with it – grab some tools, or keys, or something.

He caught the scent of humans. There was always some human scent around, on the paths, in bird watchers’ hides; but this was fresh, and mingled with the smell of car engines and a chemical scent he couldn’t identify. Traffickers, or conservationists? Time to investigate.

In a clearing was a van, and three men standing beside it, intent on something. It looked like a surveyor’s theodolite. They were wearing light brown jackets – it took him a moment to realise that these were actually fluorescent orange, but as a wolf he couldn’t see red – and the lettering on the van said _Landesvermessungsamt Sachsen-Anhalt_. Surveyors. False alarm.

He turned to go, when one of the men shouted something, and he felt a sharp pain in his flank. He yelped, and leapt back, starting to run. He had been running for several minutes when his muscles started to feel numb. Stumbling, he thought, _Sachsen-Anhalt? They’re well outside their territory. And anyway, who uses a theodolite nowadays? Surveyors all use GPS_.

He collapsed at the side of the track. He couldn’t even make his legs even carry him up the bank and into a thicket. Fool! Why had he run along one of the humans’ paths? But his last thought before he lost consciousness was, _Oh, yes. I was supposed to get caught, wasn’t I. I might manage that yet!_


	3. Chapter 3

Motte came to, lying on a bed of straw on a concrete surface. It looked rather as he had imagined a dog pound would look: partitioned into cubicles with concrete floor, wooden sides and wire netting doors. Two of the other cubicles also contained sleeping wolves. He had never actually seen a dog pound, however worried Lina and Frau Pruschke might have been that he would end up in one when he had first changed. The door to his cubicle was fastened by a simple hook and eye, which even his wolf’s paw could easily unlatch. He emerged into the yard and looked around.

The yard was not large – about twice the size of the living room at his flat. To one side of it were two rows of the cubicles; the whole was enclosed in a stout metal fence. The fence was not wire netting, but expanded metal; wire netting, of the tough sort used to restrain pigs, was stretched overhead. Obviously people were not taking any chances that their wolves might escape. A door where humans could enter and leave was securely bolted and padlocked.

Motte sniffed around the enclosure. Two humans had been in here recently, one of whom had been in the wood with the survey van. The scent was only an hour or so old, but there was nobody in sight, or earshot, at the moment. After another twenty minutes of frustrated pacing, he simply gave up, returned to his cell, and went back to sleep.

He woke again – some hours later, from the position of the sun – at the sound of a metallic clatter. Human voices were speaking a language he didn’t recognise. Before long, some sort of pole, poked through the netting. undid the hooks on the cages. No one seemed to notice that his was already undone, thank God.

Emerging again from his cell, he could smell food. In one corner of the yard was a metal bowl, into which someone seemed to have emptied a tin or two of dog food. Motte, by now quite ravenous, was about to tuck in when he suddenly remembered, _No meat!_ But it must have been days since he last ate, and he couldn’t hold back. After wolfing down ( _Ha!_ he thought) several mouthfuls, the worst edge had gone from his hunger. He stepped back, wondering whether the other two wolves were awake enough to eat the rest. If so, did eating first and leaving them his scraps establish him as the alpha wolf?

The two humans were still outside the enclosure. One of them had got out a mobile phone and was trying to photograph the wolves through the fence. Expanded metal not being very conducive to poking a camera through, he seemed to be having great difficulty. The other was making suggestions which the photographer didn’t seem to appreciate. Eventually his companion went off and came back with a step ladder.

Raised above the fence, the man could now point his phone camera through the wire netting and get some good shots of Motte and the other two wolves, who had finally come out to eat.

The phone! That’s what Motte needed! With hardly a thought, he leapt at the phone. His snout got only a couple of centimetres beyond the wire, but a lucky swipe with one paw knocked the phone out of the man’s hand and it clattered to the floor.

‘ _Bogurodzica!_ ’ exclaimed the man, barely keeping his balance on the ladder. A heated conversation with his companion ensued, but Motte ignored this. He picked up the phone in his mouth and took it back to his cell.

To his dismay, the phone would work in camera mode without letting you use other features. When he tried to log in, he got a screen with a pattern of nine dots. But Motte would not be defeated. Tilting the phone this way and that, he could see, under the wolf slobber, a smear of finger grease near the centre of the screen and, hey presto! One of the orientations lined up this smear with the nine dots. His wolf’s paw was far too coarse to draw the shape to the phone’s satisfaction, as was his nose. His tongue was far too floppy. Or was it?

When Motte had first turned into a wolf, he had spent some time in an intermediate form. His head had been a wolf’s head, and his hands wolf’s paws, but he still walked upright on human feet. Most importantly, he could still talk, after a fashion, with a human tongue. Could he transform his tongue now?

Sure enough, he could. He traced the shape on the grid of dots, first one way, then the other. Yes! He was in!

The human voices had ceased. Motte feared that they would be fetching a tranquilliser gun. He had no wish to be shot with that again, and anyway, he had to work fast. Wonder of wonders, the phone had a ‘three words’ app, so he could get his co-ordinates. He then had to compose a text to Lina. ‘Caught. Ppl spkg polish? My loc:’ and the three words.

He wondered how long it would take Lina to find him. Could he keep the men from their phone? Not only did he not want them to get Lina’s details from the call log, he wanted to get the phone to Lina. If she could hack into it, she might get invaluable information about the traffickers. He thrust it under his bedding as he heard the door open and someone enter the enclosure.

Well, they presumably knew he was a were, but not what shapes he could assume. Best save human shape for later. Attack is the best form of defence, and easier when you’re a wolf. Motte came out into the yard to meet his captors. As he did so, he felt the two other wolves fall in beside him, one on his right, the other on his left. _This is it, guys_ , he thought.


	4. Chapter 4

Lina Herrmann and Balthasar Schielmann were sitting at a table in front of a coffee shop opposite the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. Two days ago, they had dropped Motte off in the woods. They had scouted around Wilhelmsdorf, but the one piece of suspicious activity they had found had been a false lead. So they had picked a fairly central location in the area where they thought the traffickers were based, and waited.

Lina hoped that the young woman travelling with an older man wouldn’t arouse too much suspicion. She wasn’t all that easy with Dr Schielmann, although his wife was a friend of long standing. Amelie Schielmann – then Amelie Pruschke – had been their teacher when she and Motte had started at the grammar school. Balthasar had been a curator at the local museum, and had found the amulet with which they tried to drive out Motte’s inner wolf. But Amelie couldn’t take a break from teaching at short notice, so it was Balthasar who accompanied her on this trip.

Posing as tourists was easy. Lina’s preference would have been to be walkers, exploring the woods, but they needed to be able to move fast if they heard from Motte. So they had agreed on Leipzig. Plenty of museums, where Balthasar could impress the staff with his knowledge, and of course the church where Bach had been organist. Lina was not particularly musical, but she found the intricacy of Bach’s music fascinating. And then there was the technology of the organ itself….

Lina’s phone pinged. A text message! The number was one she didn’t recognise – how could it be otherwise? – but the message was definitely from Motte.

‘They’ve caught him! He’s given a location – I’ll just look it up. He doesn’t say he’s escaped, so I wonder how he got to use the phone.’

Copying the words from the text message into the app gave a location near the border with Poland: a complex of farm buildings well away from any village or other farm. A good location for holding the wolves, and they might even be staging the fights there. ‘Let’s go!’ she said. ‘No, I think you’d better leave your coffee.’ She saw him drain his cup as she stuffed the phone in her bag and shrugged into her coat.

 _Maybe Leipzig wasn’t such a good idea_ , Lina thought as they made their way through the slow traffic towards the autobahn. ‘The nav app says three and a half hours,’ said Balthasar, who was holding her phone. ‘It’s the other side of Berlin! Do you really think you can get to your boyfriend in time?’

Lina ignored the ‘boyfriend’ reference. ‘I’m going to try. Besides, I think the app assumes everyone drives at a hundred kilometres an hour on the autobahn. I drive at twice that. Now, let me concentrate. We want the A9, going north.’

Once they’d reached the A9, about half an hour later, Lina demonstrated that hers had been no idle boast. Her car might be a small family hatchback, but it had a powerful engine and Lina knew how to handle it. She powered north at two hundred and twenty kilometres per hour, seldom dropping below two hundred, and derived some satisfaction from the growing look of amazement on Dr Schielmann’s face (when she could spare it a glance). He didn’t seem to be the type who’d have driven around in sports cars as a young man, and she almost felt sorry for him sitting in the front seat beside her. Almost.

Having been very fortunate with the traffic as they skirted Berlin, it was still under two hours after they’d received the text message, let alone got on the road, that they came of the autobahn onto country roads. Except in the few towns, Lina kept the pace up. The app might predict forty-five more minutes to their destination, but Lina wanted to make it thirty-five.

At the final turning, Lina glanced down the side road, spotted the buildings, and drove on without even slowing. ‘Hey! I said right again!’ shouted Balthasar.

‘Yes. I saw it. But I don’t want to go any closer than this yet. Assuming they’re there, even if they are taken up with fighting Motte, I don’t want them to even suspect that we’re here. Now, let me look at the map again.’ She pulled in and took the phone from him. ‘Okay. I see.’ She handed it back, put the car back into gear, and set off again. The next left took her through narrow lanes, into a village and back out onto the main road they’d left a few minutes earlier.

At the edge of the village she parked the car. ‘Right. We walk from here.’

As they approached the farm, they could hear noises. Human shouts plus animal noises that could easily be wolves. There seemed to be a fight going on.

Lina realised for the first time that she had no idea what to do. She had never been out on a raid with the anti-trafficking group, and besides, their rule was never to confront the traffickers until the police had arrived. This time, no police – just her and the (she thought) rather ineffectual Dr Schielmann.

She crept closer.


	5. Chapter 5

At the end of one of the farm buildings was a concrete pit that seemed to have been converted into a wolf pen. Half a dozen wooden cubicles had been built at one end, and the whole pit had been surrounded by a stout metal fence. Wire netting had been stretched across overhead, and the door was secured with several bolts. Had been secured, that was: it now hung open, and a padlock lay on the floor beside it. The sound of fighting, however, came not from there but from behind the barn.

When she put her head around the corner of the barn she saw two men fighting three wolves. _Why haven’t the wolves bolted?_ she wondered. _How long has this been going on, anyway? They can’t have been fighting for three whole hours!_ Two wolves had their jaws clamped on parts of one man’s body – he was wearing thick leather, so not injured – and they were swaying back and forth. A second man was holding some sort of gun, trying to take aim at the wolves, but whenever he did, the third wolf leapt at him, forcing him to defend himself.

 _Oh, I see. If any wolf turns tail and runs, he’ll get shot. They must be weres to have worked that out._ As she watched, the gun went off. A missile smashed against the barn door. _Hypodermic dart? That explains a lot._ The man with the wolves said something in a foreign language. Lina didn’t have to understand the words to hear the critical tone of voice.

The man with the gun fumbled at his belt for another round of ammunition. As he did, he caught sight of Lina. He shouted and pointed as Lina ducked back behind the corner. But this distraction had given the wolves the break they needed. When she wasn’t followed, Lina poked her head round again to find both men on the floor, each with a wolf standing on his chest. The third wolf stood between them, nipping at any limb that dared move.

 _Shit_ , Lina thought. _I haven’t got anything to tie them up with._ _M_ _y toolbox and_ _a_ _ll my rope are back at the car._ To her surprise, Balthasar came running up with his tourist’s holdall. From it he took his camera, quickly removed the strap and began – without any protest from the wolves – to tie one of the men’s ankles together. He then removed the man’s shoes and extracted the laces.

‘Come on!’ he said. ‘Help me tie him up!’ With surprising competence he rolled the man over onto his front. The wolves stopped the man putting up more than cursory resistance. Lina came over and knelt on the man as Balthasar forced the man’s arms behind his back and tied his wrists with the laces.

‘What are we going to use for the other guy?’ asked Lina.

‘Does your coat have a drawstring? For the hood, or something?’

Lina’s half-length jacket had no hood, but it did have elastic around the hem at the waist. This was soon extracted, and the second man tied hand and foot.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Lina.

‘I was hoping you’d tell me that! But I want to look at that house.’

‘House?’

‘The farm house. You can tell by the roof that it hasn’t been inhabited for years, but if you look at that end’ – he pointed – ‘you can see that someone has repaired the door and window. Recently. So something is going on inside.’

Without waiting for Lina, Balthasar set off towards the house. Lina was about to follow, but one of the wolves was tugging at her sleeve. It led her over to the pen.

Three of the boxes had been slept in. _That’s all the wolves accounted for, then_. The wolf went into one and pawed at the bedding. After a few seconds, out came a mobile phone. Treasure trove! Lina picked it up, just as she heard Dr Schielmann’s voice from the house. She stuffed the phone in her pocket and ran back outside, the wolf (Motte?) at her heels.

At the end of the house a window had been forced open. She stuck her head in to find an empty room. Balthasar’s voice was coming from somewhere further in, so she hoisted herself onto the sill and squirmed through the window.

The room had been a kitchen, but the sink over which she had to crawl was mercifully now quite dry. She dropped to the floor, brushed herself off and went to join Dr Schielmann in the next room, where she found him bent over a tin trunk. It was full of equipment for handling wolves. Leather gauntlets and leggings; ammunition for the dart gun; muzzles; chains; and much more.

‘Do we take it with us?’ he asked.

‘No. Leave it. We can’t use it, and if we’re caught with it we’ll have a lot of explaining to do. I take it you’ve been photographing everything?’

‘Of course. What do you think I am? On an archaeological dig, you don’t disturb _anything_ until you’ve got a photographic record of the context in which you found it!’

‘Archaeological dig?’

‘Oh yes. I did a lot of fieldwork for my PhD. I might have made it my career, too, but then I met Amelie. It’s hard to date a teacher when you’re never home and she can’t get away, so I got the job at the museum. That must have been about a year before you and Schultze came to borrow that amulet.’

He went on to show her around the part of the house now in use. It amounted to three rooms on the ground floor; doors to other rooms had been boarded up. A tarpaulin had been stretched across what had once been a stairwell, and kept out the rain. The stairs were still present, but not safe to climb, with many of the treads crumbled to dust. It seemed one person was living here, and presumably keeping an eye on the wolves; the other man must be staying somewhere else.

‘Anyway, that’s how I spotted the house,’ he was saying. ‘A good part of our fieldwork is looking at the remains of buildings and working out who used them for what, and when. We seldom get clues anything like as easy as that door!’ He waved in the direction of the repaired door.

At this point they were interrupted by the sound of a car engine starting. Lina ran back to the window to see a large, white van drive out of the yard. ‘Oh, no! Why didn’t we think to immobilise the van first?’ she wailed. The two men had gone, and there was no sign of the wolves.

Dr Schielmann came up beside her. ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself,’ he said. Until we saw the men, we couldn’t be sure the van wasn’t legit. Although I could tell there was some fakery going on.’

‘Fakery?’

‘The sign on the side said it was the survey office for Saxony Anhalt. But they were trapping wolves in Thuringia, and we’re in Brandenburg here. On top of that it had a Hamburg number plate. HH-something. I wrote it down.’

‘So you mean it’s a fake?’

‘My guess is that the number plate’s a fake. Why fake a survey office logo for the wrong state? So I think it’s a genuine van with a fake number plate. It’s a Merc Sprinter – loads of them around – so they probably looked at a car park somewhere, found one of the right colour, and duplicated the number.’

‘But that means … that means that tracking the number plate won’t help!’

‘Oh, Lina, my girl! What have you been doing at work the last six months? I stuck one of your tracking devices to the van. We can follow it anywhere!’

She looked at him, dumbstruck. Eventually she regained her composure and said, ‘What are we waiting for? Let’s get back to the car!’

‘Well, for a start I want to photograph that wolf pen. But yes, I think we should leave this place.’

Ten minutes later, after Dr Schielmann had made a very thorough photographic record of the wolf pen, the spent hypodermic dart, and several other features Lina hadn’t even noticed, they set off back to the village. There was the car, just as they had left it. And curled up beside it was a wolf.

‘Motte!’ cried Lina, and ran to put her arms around him. But the wolf didn’t seem to know her. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Will an amulet help? I brought one,’ offered Balthasar. When Lina unlocked the car, he opened the back and rummaged around until he came out with it. The same wolf’s head amulet that she and Motte had borrowed all those years ago – she could see where it had got chipped when Motte dropped it from the roof of their apartment block. ‘Yes,’ he smiled. ‘This one we know works.’

The wolf was not so enthusiastic. When Lina offered him the amulet, he backed away, whining, and batted at it with a paw. ‘Can you change back?’ Lina asked? The wolf looked puzzled. ‘You remember. You’d lost the amulet, and we thought you’d get stuck in wolf form, but you changed back. Make the effort!’

The wolf seemed to get the idea. It reared up on its hind legs and made an effort. Suddenly it wasn’t there any more. Instead, there was a frightened-looking naked boy, maybe sixteen years old. He pushed the amulet back at Lina and said something in a foreign language.


	6. Chapter 6

Six o’clock found Lina and Slavc, as the boy’s name turned out to be, sitting round the table of the ‘family suite’ at a medium-sized hotel on the edge of a run-down industrial town north-east of Berlin. Balthasar had gone out for some takeaway food. Lina now had her laptop open on the table, attempting to log in to the (still experimental) tracking system that she had helped develop. At the same time she tried to encourage Slavc to tell her about his experiences.

Slavc spoke almost no German and little English. He came from Slovenia, or possibly Slovakia, and had been bitten about a year previously. He had known nothing about lycanthropy, and had hidden himself away during the change, having no idea what was happening. Having failed to change back after his first full moon, he had run away and roamed across Europe, ending up in the slate hills of Thuringia. During the raid he had felt drawn to Lina because she had Motte’s scent on her, and when he escaped he’d tracked her back to the car. He did not know what had happened to the other two wolves, but he thought one might have been captured when the men escaped.

By this time the tracking system had informed Lina that the van was in Poland, and Balthasar had returned with supper and some clothes that he hoped might fit Slavc better than Motte’s tee-shirt and jeans that he was currently wearing.

‘Amelie phoned,’ he said. ‘Father Alvarez has landed at Frankfurt, and she’s off to collect him from the airport. We need to decide where, and how, to meet.’

Decision was postponed, however, until after supper. Then, all feeling a lot better, Slavc lay down on his bed to rest, while Lina and Balthasar discussed plans.

‘I think they must still have Motte. If they didn’t catch him, he would definitely have gone to the car with Slavc.’

‘So we’ve got to go after them and rescue him?’

‘I’m going after them anyway. This sort of thing has to be wiped out, and no-one else will believe it’s happening. Besides, even if it’s not Motte, someone needs rescuing.’

‘And full moon is’ – he looked in a pocket diary – ‘the day after tomorrow. That gives us a bit of breathing space.’

Lina tapped a few keys on her laptop. She swore under her breath.

‘What’s up?’

‘Full moon is the day after tomorrow – at 03:20 local time. Which night do you think werewolves will be active?’

‘Oh. Damn. That makes it rather tight. Okay, then, where have we got to go? Do you know where the fights are being held?’

‘None of the stuff I hacked had nearly enough detail in it, unfortunately. I didn’t even get any of the messages to clients telling them where to come. Maybe those are delivered personally. But I think I’ve cracked it.

‘There are some large tracts of forest on the way to Breslau that are fenced off. No-go areas. There used to be quarries, or open cast mines, in there, and it’s dangerous for tourists. And there also used to be whole villages, even towns, for the mine workers. Now the buildings are empty, many of them just shells. And the van has now gone off the road into one of them. It’s been stationary there for nearly half an hour. It’s too soon to say if they’ll move on, but it looks like the perfect place to set up their arena.

‘I just hope they haven’t pulled a switch, and shifted Motte to a different van.’

‘I don’t think that’s very likely,’ replied Balthasar. ‘They weren’t expecting to be disturbed at the farm. And if they did pull a switch, they wouldn’t go so far off the road to do it – too easy to get caught bringing their new van back to the road.’

A plan to pick up Father Alvarez from Berlin the next day was vetoed. ‘This mining area is five kilometres across,’ said Lina. ‘We know the location of the van, but not the arena. Even with the information we have it’ll take most of the day to find them. I’ve found Father Alvarez a route to get to Cottbus on the early train tomorrow, and we can pick him up on our way. We need everyone we can get, and we need them as soon as possible.’

Phoning to check if Father Alvarez could join them, and whether he would be able to catch an early train, produced the information that he had already gone to bed. ‘It may be evening here, but it’s five in the morning in Sydney, and the poor man’s been up all night,’ Amelie had scolded. Even the early train would feel like afternoon for Father Alvarez, she said, and she could certainly take him to the station; she merely hoped she’d be in a fit state to take her classes afterwards.

‘Right. We need to be better prepared than this afternoon, too,’ said Balthasar.

‘What? Like carrying some electric cable to tie them up with?’ Lina was still embarrassed by that omission.

‘No way. This place will be crawling with criminals who will not hesitate to shoot, plus rich, influential people who will gladly protect them if they can see a profit in it. We need to get in, get the wolves, and get out. I just wish we had a bigger car.’

He was right about the car, Lina mused. With the three of them plus Father Alvarez it would be crowded. Add Motte and at least one other, and there was no hope. ‘Could Motte and Slavc follow on foot?’ she asked.

‘I expect so, but I don’t think it’s fair on them,’ said Balthasar. ‘Far better if we book a hire car from Cottbus station, and make the trip in two cars. I’ll book something large, since we don’t know how many we’ll need to carry.

Planning, and booking cars, and train tickets, and all the other details, went on surprisingly late into the evening, but eventually Lina and Balthasar had done as much planning as they could, and they followed Slavc’s example and headed for their respective beds.


	7. Chapter 7

Motte came back to consciousness in … actually he had no idea how to describe his surroundings. He still felt very groggy. He had been right, he thought. He really hadn’t wanted to get hit by another tranquilliser dart. There were several humans this time, and one of them pounced on him as soon as he showed signs of waking up. _Oh, no! Not another injection!_ But this one was a stimulant. The humans quickly got out of the way as Motte came back to full awareness. ‘You better put on good show. We take lot of trouble over you,’ one of them said.

He paced around the enclosure where he now was. Parts of it looked like old mine workings, but fences and doors had been added. The sun was low in the sky. The same evening? The next morning? No, probably the next afternoon, judging by how hungry he felt. No dog food this time. Motte was glad not to be eating meat, but even with the stimulant he didn’t think he’d be at full strength without food.

More pacing and sniffing confirmed Motte in his suspicion that this was the arena. Tonight was full moon – Motte could feel it. Was it safe to remain in wolf shape under the full moon? No help for it. If they had a Spanish werewolf, he certainly didn’t want to be in human shape fighting it! He could smell something strange. A human, but not quite right. Definitely not one of his fellow wolves from Thuringia. He hoped they’d both escaped. As he had before, having found no way out, he curled up and tried to sleep. _Need to save my strength_ , he thought.

Sleep was impossible with the stimulant, but by now, dusk was falling. Some lights on poles around the arena had been turned on, and people were filing into rows of seats. Motte studied the crowd. _Hard to make out people’s features when I’m the one in the spotlight_ , he thought. A few he thought he would recognise if he saw them again. One ….

By now the seats were full, and Motte’s thoughts were interrupted by an announcer, telling people to get ready for their evening’s entertainment. _Time to sit up and do my tricks for them._ He yawned and stretched.

The moon had risen. Motte knew this, although he could not see it with the lights blinding his night vision. He sat back and let out a howl. _Give the audience what they’re expecting._

An answering howl came from behind one of the doors. A mechanism of some sort was raising the door, but someone was impatient. A body crashed into the door and it shook.

The door had risen less than a metre when the body – presumably whoever had howled – squeezed underneath it. It looked like a cross between a dire wolf from one of the horror stories he used to like and … a bear? Something large, anyway. It got to its feet and charged at Motte.

Dodging and weaving, the two of them chased each other around the arena. Motte knew that this monster could tear him to pieces if it caught him. However, it seemed to have no reason at all. It just attacked, lashing out at anything that might remotely qualify as prey. Like a bullfighter facing an enraged bull, Motte had no difficulty dodging, but with no weapon, he couldn’t dispatch his opponent. Besides, this monster was presumably a human being for most of the month.

After about ten minutes, the thought occurred to him: if he and the monster didn’t put on a good enough show, what might the humans do to them? But then he got his opportunity. The dire wolf had got one paw caught in a pulley wheel from the old mine. It looked as though it might break a leg trying to attack him.

Motte changed shape. Not fully human – he kept a wolf’s head and paw-like hands, but gave himself human legs and feet. Entering into the spirit of the show, he gave another howl, and then rushed at the dire wolf. Not to attack it, though it was sufficiently taken aback at his transformation that he might have got in a good blow. He pushed it back and freed its paw from the pulley. He heard a gasp from the crowed as he dodged away again and, with human rather than lupine agility, climbed up some rusting equipment at the side of the arena.

The monster, as he had suspected, was too far gone to be grateful, and just charged at him again. He climbed higher, just out of its reach, and let out another howl. Then he jumped from his perch and landed on the monster’s back.

His plan had been to get an arm around its neck. This was easier said than done, however. He was thrown off, and only just scrambled out of the way without getting bitten.

Fighting as wolf-man was very different from fighting as wolf, Motte discovered. One thing he could do, however, which the dire wolf could not, was kick. Without shoes it was painful on his feet, but ran little risk of doing serious damage to his opponent. Motte made full use of it, although he received a nasty bite the one time he kicked his opponent in the mouth.

Changing tactics again, he grappled with the monster. This was a mistake, and he nearly got his throat bitten out, but then another howl came from outside the arena. Behind him, another door leading to part of the mine came crashing open, and out of the tunnel another wolf-man came running. Or wolf boy, rather – he could only have been a teenager. He ran up to Motte and the dire wolf and jabbed something into the latter’s flank. Motte recognised the boy’s scent – he had been Motte’s right-hand wolf in the battle at the farm.

The monster turned to attack the boy. But with the two of them, one could always distract it before the other got hurt. More worrying was the noise of the crowd. Most people thought this was part of the show, but Motte could sense that several of them knew it was not, and they were about to take action.

A shot rang out, and ricocheted off the concrete of the enclosure. A voice from Wolf Boy’s tunnel shouted, ‘This way! All three of you!’ Lina! She had followed him here! The monster had stopped struggling, now. Motte and Wolf Boy grabbed a foreleg each and ran with him into the tunnel. Lina led the way into the mine, electric torch in hand. Behind them, Motte could hear a door being pulled back across the opening and fastened in place.


	8. Chapter 8

The tunnel angled gently downhill. _Odd_ , thought Motte. _This doesn’t smell like a mine_. And to his surprise, before very long they emerged into moonlight. They were near the bottom of a wide bowl of bare rock. An opencast mine! So the tunnel was what? An ore conveyor?

Lina stopped them and shone her torch across the bowl. An answering flash came from somewhere on the rim, almost opposite them. But to his surprise, Lina didn’t head down into the bowl, but to the right along some sort of road.

‘Wait!’ Motte tried to say, but he couldn’t make his mouth shape the word. The dire wolf had completely lost consciousness, now, and he and Wolf Boy couldn’t drag him any further.

‘Let me,’ said Lina. She handed her torch to Dr Schielmann, who had emerged from the tunnel behind them, and hoisted the dire wolf in something resembling a fireman’s lift. ‘We need to get him to Father Alvarez. Plackett’s the only person who’s done any work on drugs and werewolves, and even he doesn’t know if this is safe, but he trusts the father to know what to do.’

At Motte’s puzzled look, she snapped, ‘Yes, drugs. What do you think Slavc did to make him collapse like that? Balthasar palmed some of the wolf hunters’ hypodermic darts, and Father Alvarez loaded them with drugs from Dr Plackett. Now come on!’ She turned and strode off along the road.

Slavc? Oh, Wolf Boy. So as not to get left behind, Motte dropped to all fours and reverted to wolf shape. In the woods, at night, this was much more comfortable than human shape, even on the sharp gravel of the road. He saw Wolf Boy – Slavc, that was – follow his example, and together they padded after the two humans and their burden.

Well before they were below the light, which Motte could easily see bobbing at the rim of the bowl, Lina and Balthasar stopped, and Lina lowered the dire wolf to the ground. They had seen something on the track, which Lina now kicked aside.

‘Right. This is where we go up. Balthasar, can you manage the patient? I can hardly walk another step.’

Dr Schielmann handed her back the torch and shouldered the burden. ‘Oof! He’s heavy! Yes, I think I can manage to the top of the slope.’

As they started up the slope, they heard gunfire, and Lina extinguished her light. ‘With luck, they’ll shoot at Father Alvarez’s torch. He left it hanging from a tree. He should be here by now,’ she panted.

Sure enough they found another human waiting for them at the top of the slope. Quite old, but not frail – just as well on an operation like this. ‘Good to see you,’ he said in English. ‘All present and correct?’

‘Yes, we all got out. The wolves, here, are Motte and Slavc. Balthasar has your patient.’

‘Excellent.’ He relieved Dr Schielmann of his burden, and gave the wolf a quick examination. ‘He doesn’t seem too badly hurt. I think our next priority is getting back to the cars and getting away. Dr Schielmann’s idea with the flashlight seems to have worked. I could hear them making for the place where I hung it. But if they’ve dogs, they’ll follow your scent.’

‘Oh!’ exclaimed Lina. ‘Of course. Motte, can you lay a false trail, and follow our scent back to the car?’

Motte sniffed around, and then nodded. He padded off into the wood. Slavc seemed happy to stick beside him. Good. That would make a stronger scent.

*

Two hours later, Motte and Slavc, trotting along the high fence that marked the edge of the wood, found the gate where Lina was waiting for them. She pulled it shut and padlocked it. ‘More misdirection,’ she said. ‘We bought that padlock in Eberswalde. It’s not the same as the old one, but at least it looks as though nobody’s used that gate.’

She turned to the car and opened the tailgate. ‘In you hop!’ She shut the tailgate behind them and climbed into the driver’s seat. ‘I don’t know what shape is most comfortable for you in the car, but the important thing is to get away. We’re meeting the others by the East Lake at Cottbus.’

Fortunately, the main road was not far, after which the journey to the border was uneventful. But it was well after midnight when they finally pulled into the car park at another disused opencast mine just outside the town. Signs around the car park showed pictures of what it might one day look like, filled with water. Lina pulled from her car a bag that turned out to contain clothes for Motte and Slavc. With some effort, and some rather painful help from the amulet, they assumed human form and gratefully climbed into the clothes.

‘Right. What next?’ asked Motte.

‘My worry was checking into a hotel with a sedated dire wolf in tow, but Father Alvarez says it’s now mid-morning for him, and he’s quite happy to stay here and look after our patient. So I’ve booked rooms at another hotel, and we can go and get some sleep. I, for one, need it!’ said Dr Schielmann. ‘Tomorrow, we can plan.’

‘Plan?’ asked Motte.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Lina. We’ve got you three out, but we need to shut down this organisation for good. They’ve got money – now they’ve had customers at at least one fight – and they have experience in trapping wolves. They may even have access to another berserker wolf. We may have busted their prime location, but they will find others.

‘Also,’ she went on, ‘they might come after us. Depending on how close they are to police and things, they may even be able to find the record of us in the hotel in Eberswalde. You have to admit that we were a very strange-looking family! It won’t be hard for them to find out our names.’

‘Not to mention what we do with our patients,’ put in Dr Schielmann. ‘We might be able to take Slavc home, but our berserker wolf will need somewhere to go each full moon.’

 _And I’ve got my own problems,_ thought Motte, though he didn’t say it aloud. He didn’t yet want even to think about what he’d seen at the fight.


	9. Chapter 9

The next morning they reconvened in the car park by the future East Lake, and immediately disagreed on where they should move next. No one wanted to raise suspicions by taking such an oddly-assorted group of people into the town, but neither did they want such an exposed location as the car park.

Slavc slipped away during the discussion, and came back twenty minutes later, announcing ‘I found place.’ Motte followed him across a road, and a few hundred metres along a track, to find a wooden structure, apparently intended for people to hold barbecues. Perfect! A good roof overhead, plenty of benches around the wall, and a fire pit – currently holding only cold ashes – in the middle.

When they had left, the berserker werewolf, now returned to human form, had still been asleep, but he started to stir as they returned to the car park. Everyone stood back to give him some space as he sat up groggily, shook himself, and remarked, ‘That was a bad one.’ Then, realising where he was, ‘Shit. Who are you?’ Before anyone could answer, he added, ‘Well, I suppose this has to be better than the gravel pit.’

Lina put in, ‘Anyone got any clothes to fit him? We can’t talk to him like this!’

The boy – he was no older than Slavc – being somewhat burly, none of the clothes available would fit him except Motte’s overcoat. While the rest of the party adjourned to the barbecue hut, Dr Schielmann was detailed to make another trip into town to buy clothes. Eventually, however, they were all sitting around the fire pit, talking.

The berserker turned out to be named Uwe Wolfshagen, much to everyone’s amusement. He seemed resigned to the jokes. He was from Innsbruck, and had first gone on the rampage three years ago. As was common for Spanish werewolves (Father Alvarez assured them), he had had no memories of his werewolf episodes. The third time he changed, he had killed his brother, something he had difficulty talking about. But this had brought various sorts of investigation upon the family, which in turn had caught the attention of the gang.

Offering to help him after a particularly unpleasant argument with his parents and the police, they had spirited him away from the supposedly secure children’s hostel, but rather than help him they had taken him to the site in Poland – he said it was a gravel pit, rather than a mine – and kept him locked up in one of the old workers’ tenements.

Once they had seen him change, and go berserk all over his cell, they knew they were onto something, and started making preparations for the fights.

‘I think that’s when I realised what I was,’ he said. ‘Every month they’d let me out into the arena, then I’d black out. When I came to, there was always the remains of a corpse there – dog, sometimes even a human, once it was a bear. As the months passed, I had to face the fact that I was killing these creatures, and that I probably had killed Jörgen.

‘But what am I doing here? Did you get me out? What are you going to do to me now?’

Motte tried to explain that he had been Uwe’s opponent last night.

‘What? Another human? I thought they’d stopped that. One of them said something about trapping wolves to fight me. But how did you survive, anyway?’

In response, Motte slipped out of his jacket and turned back into Wolf Man. ‘I’m a werewolf,’ he said, simply.

Everyone else started speaking at once, trying to explain to Uwe about the different sorts of lycanthropy, but eventually Lina called a halt.

‘The important thing is, we have to bust this gang. They’ve been doing this for _three years_ , you say? How come I never heard of it before?’

‘Important, yes, but not urgent,’ Father Alvarez pointed out. ‘What is urgent is that we have to find Uwe somewhere to go at full moon. Uwe, I think you don’t want to go back to Innsbruck?’

‘I don’t think I could go home,’ Uwe said, haltingly. ‘I don’t know what the verdict was on Jörgen’s death, but when I vanished, they probably thought I must have been guilty.’

‘Lina, could you help?’ asked Dr Schielmann. ‘You must know about finding homes for refugees, and for people who have been enslaved.’

‘Yes,’ Lina replied. ‘But this is different. I don’t think anyone in immigration will think that someone on the run from the Austrian police is acceptable as a refugee in Germany! We’ll probably have to get him a new identity, and I’ve never done anything like that.’

‘And then there’s Slavc,’ put in Motte. ‘He needs a home. Slavc, where do you want to go?’

They took some time to explain to Slavc what the options might be. ‘I want … live with Motte and Lina?’ he suggested.

There was an awkward pause.

‘Er… I don’t live with Motte,’ Lina said finally.

Slavc looked from one to the other, incredulous. ‘Why not?’

Dr Schielmann looked as though he was trying hard not to laugh. ‘Amelie and I have no children,’ he said in English. ‘Lina is a friend, and I think Motte is too, now. If you come and live with us, you can see them often.’

‘Can you really commit your wife to this?’ asked Father Alvarez.

‘Well, we’ll need to discuss it in more detail when we’re back in Frankfurt. But she did talk about giving a home to a werewolf when we were planning this. So I think she’ll be agreeable.’

‘Okay. Could you take on Uwe for a few days while we get things sorted out? That makes things a lot easier,’ said Lina. ‘But back to the gang. What do we know?’

They pooled their information. There was precious little, and nothing to keep them in the east. ‘I think we can do this better from Frankfurt,’ said Motte. ‘I know they’ve got connections there, and I don’t mean Faulwetter.’


	10. Chapter 10

The drive back to Frankfurt took six hours. Dr Schielmann had phoned the car hire base to change the booking and arrange to return the car at Frankfurt Airport the next day. This meant they could use both cars for their journey: Lina, Motte and Slavc in one, Dr Schielmann, Father Alvarez and Uwe in the other. Lina was not in a hurry, but still drove fast enough to have time for a quite leisurely break and a meal on the way. Dr Schielmann took the journey at a more sober pace, but arrived only a few minutes behind them. Had he even stopped for supper?

Amelie Schielmann gave a big show of motherly affection, to the obvious embarrassment of the two teenagers. Fortunately, as a teacher, she had experience of teenagers and knew when to back off. Once they’d agreed a time to meet the next day, Motte went home to his flat, and Lina to her parents, leaving the Schielmanns’ guest rooms full but not bursting.

*

The next morning, after a wash, a shave, and some belated first aid for the wounds he had sustained in wolf shape, Motte went to the office. He wasn’t due back at work yet, so he might elicit some surprise, but he hoped no one would disturb him; he had things to do that he thought would be easier from his work computer.

First, he called up his boss’s calendar, to see where his boss claimed to have been for the last two days. Then he started checking the internet and making phone calls, and soon confirmed his suspicion: his boss had not been at the conference in Bremen. In fact, there hadn’t even been a conference in Bremen. The hotel where he claimed he had been staying confirmed that the room had been booked, but the guest hadn’t shown up.

Some more digging came up with a name, Helmut von Wichtringhausen. This was a name that Lina had found, investigating the trafficking gang, and now, here it was in his boss’s contacts. Motte phoned Lina.

‘Who _is_ he?’ Lina echoed. ‘I’m not sure. Heavy industry? Not banking, anyway. He’s too high up to get involved in bank deals, I think, but he might just know the director personally. Unlikely, though.’

‘Well, he seems to know my boss. I didn’t want to say it at the time, but I’m pretty sure my boss was watching the fight. So I think we have a connection. Which end of the string should we pull, and how hard?’

‘Um. Could you, like, sound out your boss and see if you can get any more clues? Without letting on that you’re onto him?’

‘Not easy. He’s no fool. But I’ll see what I can do.’

Motte still hadn’t thought of anything by lunchtime, but it was lunchtime that provided the opportunity. As he was walking down to the dining room, he encountered his boss.

‘Hallo, Schultze. I didn’t expect to see you today. How was your break?’

‘Stressful,’ Motte replied. ‘I’ve come back to the office to relax.’ An old joke, and not even a very good one, but he thought it would set the right tone.

‘Well, as long as you don’t relax on company time!’

‘No need to worry about that, sir. Oh! While I think of it – I ran into an old school friend. She’s a journalist. She’s doing some profiles of movers and shakers in the business world, and she wondered if I might introduce her to you.’

‘Well, it’s a bit irregular. She ought to talk to our press office. But since you ask … Who else is on her list?’

 _Played right into my hand_ , Motte thought. ‘She didn’t give many names. Oh yes! Helmut von, er, Winninghausen? No, von Wichtringhausen.’

‘Good lord! She’ll be lucky!’

‘Do you know him, sir? I didn’t recognise the name, but she said she didn’t think he was in banking.’ Carefully he drew the director out, making mental notes.

 _That could so easily have gone wrong_ , Motte thought as they separated, Motte to head for the cafeteria, his boss for the managers’ dining room. He didn’t linger over his meal, but went straight back to his office and phoned Lina again.

‘Jackpot!’ he said. He explained what he had learnt. ‘I think Wichtringhausen must be the key man. He’s in mining, and he bought out a lot of the collapsing mines in the east after reunification. I wonder if he owns the Polish mines as well.’

‘He does,’ she replied. ‘I finally got some data on the Polish end. Most of the pits in that area are government owned, even now, but four of them were sold off when Poland joined the EU. Competition law, I think. And Wichtringhausen bought them.’ They arranged to meet at the Schielmanns’ that evening, and signed off.

Before Motte could get any further with his research, his boss walked into his office. ‘Ah, Schultze. Glad I caught you.’

‘What can I do for you, sir?’

‘I think we need to have a chat. I’m not happy about you, right now.’

‘Sorry to hear that, sir. What’s the matter?’

‘Well, first you take several days off at short notice. You don’t often do that. Then you come back a day early, with those awful sticking plasters on, saying you had a stressful break. And you try and pump me about Wichtringhausen. I think you may be getting mixed up in something dangerous. And if so, I’ve come to warn you. I don’t know how far in you are, but I think you may find it more than you can handle.’

‘I’m not sure I follow you, sir.’

‘I think you follow me well enough, Schultze. I’m warning you not to get out of your depth.’

‘A warning, sir? Or was that a threat?’

‘I’m hoping you’re sensible enough that no one will need to threaten you. If you’re not, you may not be the sort of person we want working for the bank, Schultze.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind, sir.’

With decidedly cold looks on both sides, Motte watched his boss leave the room. _I don’t like that_ , he thought. _Not like him to come and see me. Usually he phones, and if we need to meet, I have to go to him. Hmm._


	11. Chapter 11

Pleased with the progress Motte had reported to her, Lina returned to the task that had been occupying her all morning: the phone.

Unsurprisingly, the SIM card already been disabled. To Lina’s annoyance, the phone also appeared to have been locked by remote control, and would not even offer her the pattern of dots to log in. This was not enough to stop her, however. Prising the back off the phone, she had extracted a memory card, albeit one of the wrong size for the card reader in her laptop. It would have fitted her own phone, but she doubted that the systems would be compatible. However, her camera had also contained a memory card, and this was one of the smaller size encased in an adaptor.

With the card finally plugged into her computer, she had spent much of the morning looking at the files on the card. Several hundred photos from the phone camera included numerous photos taken at wolf fights, and Lina had become so revolted by these that she had turned away and started trying to decode the files containing the owner’s contacts and appointments diary.

Her first break had been a series of text messages that had allowed her to connect the mines to Wichtringhausen. But most of the messages were in Polish, which she didn’t speak, and there had been little progress since, so Lina turned back to the photos.

The photos of wolf fights had been pretty gruesome. What was that berserker wolf doing to the Rottweiler? But interspersed with these were some others that were more puzzling. Suddenly light dawned. Was Wichtringhausen using slave labour in his mines? Some of the eastern European mines were in very loosely regulated economies – if you could call them regulated at all – and it might well be possible to catch refugees fleeing from the Near East and draft them to work there. Could this be how Wichtringhausen had made the eastern mines profitable when so many businesses there had failed?

Lina returned to the incomprehensible text messages looking for more clues. But she had to give up, and eventually she phoned a colleague.

‘Hallo Anton? I need your help. Yes, I’m still investigating that weird lead that you wouldn’t believe was real. No, I’m not going to try and persuade you that we’ve found werewolves – yet. No, I think I’ve found the end of something big. It’s connected, but this is something totally normal. For a suitable definition of normal.’

With difficulty, she persuaded Anton that she wasn’t now talking about anything uncanny, but just ‘normal’ people trafficking. Once she had, she said, ‘It’s Wichtringhausen. I think he may be using slave labour in some of his mines.’

‘Come off it, Lina!’ came Anton’s voice over the phone. ‘Wichtringhausen’s one of the biggest businessmen in Europe. He’s got so many interests in Russia he’s practically one of their oligarchs, now. And he’s even more secretive than the Albrecht brothers. You can’t possibly have found anything!’

‘What evidence do you need, Anton? This came up in my investigation of the other case, but this is exactly the sort of thing we’re here to stop. You can’t just dismiss it!’

Another ten minutes of debate, and she packaged up the photos and some of the other data into one big zip file. And it was big – the photos were already highly compressed, and didn’t get any smaller when zipped – so she encrypted it and uploaded it to her dropbox, e-mailing Anton a link.

*

Lina was sitting with Slavc and Uwe at the Schielmanns’ house. Amelia was not yet home from school, and Balthasar had had work at the museum to catch up on, so Lina had come over to look after the two lads, and possibly come up with some rather firmer plans for their future. The biggest unknown, unfortunately, was whether they could even get papers for Slavc and Uwe to remain in Germany. ‘And what do I do at full moon?’ asked Uwe.

‘According to the Australians, they try and find their werewolves secure rooms where they can run amok for one night a month. Dr Plackett lives in a former bank building, and he’s converted rooms in the vaults for some of them. I think this Schneider person uses that. As more werewolves joined their group, they found a former wine cellar that could also be converted.’

‘Why are these all underground? I was kept underground at the gravel pit, too,’ put in Uwe.

‘Doesn’t say. If it was to protect you from moonlight, you’d think they’d mention it. Maybe it’s to make sure they’re not seen or heard by neighbours. Anyway, I hope Bathasar and Amelie can let you have a padded cell in their basement.

Slavc, apparently feeling left out of this long discussion in German, interrupted.

‘Where you live?’

‘Me? I live in Munich, in the south of Germany. My parents live in Frankfurt – in this city – so I come here to visit them.’

They proceeded to discuss the work that she did, and she led the conversation onto what sort of work Slavc might do. He had grown up in a rural community, and hadn’t had much thought beyond farm work, but it turned out that one of the things that had motivated his long migration in wolf shape had been a desire to see the world. Lina wondered if he might be able to train as a lorry driver. While some drivers ended up driving a tanker to collect milk from the same local farms day after day, others got to drive the length and breadth of Europe.

Lina had done little more than plant this idea in his head when her phone rang.

It was Anton. ‘Lina, you’ve hit pay dirt! We didn’t think it counted as trafficking – it’s mostly inside Russia – but Wichtringhausen has got contacts in Chechnya who find people displaced by the troubles there, offer to find them jobs elsewhere in Russia, and then spirit them off to the mines. Anyway, I passed those text messages to Ania, in Warsaw, and she thinks you’ve finally provided evidence that he’s taking them out of Russia illegally to work in his mines in Poland. It’ll take a lot of work, and probably lawyers, but I think we may be able to move on him soon.’


	12. Chapter 12

Over the next three weeks, there was little to do except wait. Discreet enquiries found that Uwe Wolfshagen was still officially wanted in Austria, and there was no way he could claim refugee status elsewhere in the EU. Lina promised to look into new papers, and a week later an official identity card arrived for one Ulrich Wolfach, ostensibly from Garmisch-Partenkirchen – far enough south that his Austrian accent wouldn’t occasion too much comment even in Bavaria.

Meanwhile the Schielmanns converted part of their basement into a safe room for Uwe. On advice from the Australian group, they did not make it a padded cell – this, apparently, would get torn to shreds in a single night – but panelled it in oak: tough enough that Uwe couldn’t do much damage, but not so hard (they hoped) that he would do himself an injury.

Slavc was less of a problem. He was not wanted for any crime, and he therefore had (in principle) the right to live and work in any EU member state. The fact that he was still legally a minor was a complication, but unless his parents objected, he could live with the Schielmanns, where they endeavoured to teach him enough German that he could study at one of the local schools. He still seemed to hero-worship Motte, but Motte did not begrudge his visits to the Schielmanns several times a week.

As full moon approached, Motte made another trip out east: first to the farm where the wolves had been held, and then to the open cast pit in Poland – the latter in wolf shape. Nothing seemed to be going on, and he came home somewhat relieved.

A few days after he returned, Motte got a message to go and see his boss, no reason given.

In the director’s office, Motte tried to keep calm, but his boss seemed fairly friendly.

‘Ah, Schultze. Another trip away at short notice, but not so many days this time. Were you hoping to see another … show? There wasn’t one this month, you know. I was wondering whether you had anything to do with that.’

Motte just managed not to give himself away, and replied, ‘Show, sir?’

‘Isn’t that what you were doing last month? I warned you not to get too deeply involved, but it seems my warning was superfluous. Nothing seems to be happening at the moment. But I was wondering if we had you to thank for that.’

‘What on earth are you talking about, sir?’

‘Well, Wichtringhausen was making quite a packet from … let’s say some very exclusive entertainment. Last month, you took some leave at short notice, Wichtringhausen’s show went absurdly wrong, and then you came back early from your leave, looking rather the worse for wear, and started pumping me for information about him. I couldn’t help but put two and two together.’

‘At least four point six, sir.’ Motte smiled.

‘You think I’m reasoning ahead of my data? Well, that’s why I employ you, I suppose. But you do seem to be rather sparing in dishing out that data, at the moment. Come clean!’

Motte decided on a half-truth. ‘Okay. Seven, eight weeks ago I got a phone call from an old school friend, Lina Herrmann. No, she’s not a journalist. She works for an outfit that’s trying to clamp down on people trafficking in Europe. She thinks she has a handle on Wichtringhausen – he’s rounding up Chechen refugees as slave labour for his mines.’

To Motte’s surprise, his boss laughed out loud at that. ‘Oh, so that’s what it was! Clever! Of your friend, I mean. Not so clever of old Helmut! But that doesn’t explain the disaster at the show. Or your injuries, for that matter. Are you sure there’s nothing more you’re keeping from me?’

‘Nothing that need concern you, sir.’

‘I’d feel better if I thought you were the best judge of that, Schulze.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose we’ve both got work to do. See you later.’

Motte took his leave and went back to his desk. He did indeed have work to do, but he found it hard to concentrate. Eventually he gave up and phoned Lina. Her mobile wasn’t responding, so he tried her office number.

‘Apparat Herrmann?’ said a male voice.

‘Oh. Is Lina not there? Can you tell her that Moritz Schultze called, please?’

‘Schultze? Are you the guy who was helping her with her weird case? The one she said was about werewolves? Can you tell me what’s really going on?’

Motte was taken aback by this. ‘Er… probably not. I mean, yes I am, but I probably can’t tell you. Um, who am I speaking to?’

‘Oh, sorry! I’m Anton Hohnberger. Lina’s gone to Warsaw. Did Lina tell you that Helmut von Wichtringhausen – you know, the mining baron – is using slave labour in his mines? Refugees from Chechnya. Thanks to the info that you and Lina found, the Polish authorities are stopping one of Wichtringhausen’s convoys today. Lina insisted on joining our people there. Don’t know why. She doesn’t speak Polish or Russian, that I know of, but all she would say was that they might need “specialist help”.’

‘Today? Wow.’ _That’s a coincidence. I wonder if my boss knows something. I hope he hasn’t told Wichtringhausen!_ ‘I can see what she means about the specialist help, but if she hasn’t told you, I don’t think I should. Sorry!’

‘You’re both being very cryptic. Oh, well. I’ll tell her you phoned when she reports in.’


	13. Chapter 13

An unproductive hour later, Motte’s phone rang. It was Lina.

‘Did Hohnberger give you my message?’

‘Anton? No, I haven’t spoken to him yet. I’ve been on a sting – with the Polish police, intercepting a slave convoy. It turns out that they’re brought into Poland on empty ore freighters. They’re taken in sealed trucks across the Baltic states to East Prussia – the Russians have special arrangements and loads of stuff goes like that – and then put on the boats to cross the border into Poland.

‘But that’s not why I phoned you. They had another werewolf. He was on a different boat. Just a kid – about thirteen – the Poles don’t know what to do with him, and they might send him back to Russia if we’re don’t act quickly. I don’t speak Russian, so I couldn’t even reassure him that we would help him. Motte, I don’t know what to do!’

‘Calm down, Lina,’ Motte replied. ‘First off, I don’t think the Schielmanns can fit another wolf pen in their basement, and he clearly can’t share with Uwe. Ulrich, I mean. Secondly, I don’t think we know anyone who speaks Russian. Thirdly, if we try and take him off the Polish authorities, when even he doesn’t know what we’re up to, we’ll cause no end of trouble.

‘I think the best thing to do is to let them send him home, and try and get him some help at that end.’

‘Okay, I suppose so. I wonder of the Australians have any contacts in Russia. I’m getting out of my depth, here.’

‘ _You’re_ getting out of _your_ depth? How do you think I felt in Poland last month?’ asked Motte.

‘Point taken. Anyway, can you think about it? I have to phone Anton.’

Hardly had Motte put the phone down when it rang again. This time it was his boss.

‘Hallo, Schultze. My contact in Poland tells me they finally managed to sting one of Wichtringhausen’s slave ships. Please congratulate your girlfriend for me! Now I’m sure you had something to do with the fight last month – they didn’t just have slaves for the mines, but one for the arena as well, and that’s the one your Frau Herrmann was interested in.’

‘Can we talk about this in your office, sir? I’d rather not say this over the phone.’

Two minutes later, Motte was in the director’s office.

‘Look, sir. You’ve been coming to see me or calling me here to talk about this for weeks, now. If it goes on like this, I’m going to find it very hard to do my job. I think it’s my turn to ask you to come clean, please.’

‘I don’t see that I owe you that – please go on.’

‘Okay. Yes, I was at the fight last month. I saw you there. You saw me, too, though you probably didn’t recognise me. But this is getting so strange that I want to ask you – what’s your involvement in these fights? You seem to know Wichtringhausen, you knew about today’s sting, but you didn’t warn him. So what’s going on?’

‘I suppose I have to believe you if you say you were at the fight. Did I really see you? I certainly didn’t recognise you! But you must have seen what was in the arena.’

‘Only too well, sir.’

‘Okay, how would you describe the creatures that were fighting?’

‘To put it bluntly, sir, two German werewolves and a Spanish berserker. I don’t mean he was Spanish – he had the Spanish form of lycanthropy.’

The director stared at him. ‘You _have_ been doing your homework, Schultze!’

‘I’m known for it, sir.’

‘Well, you know about the fights, then. I didn’t believe it when I first heard about them, but something was very wrong. In the end I decided to go along and see a fight. After all, I can hardly denounce someone for running werewolf fights even _with_ evidence, let alone without it.’

‘Hardly, sir.’

‘So I made enquiries and, last month, Wichtringhausen finally allowed me to buy a ticket. Spanish werewolf versus German werewolf, we were told. The second wolf man was quite a surprise. I think it was even more of a surprise for the organisers. Was that you, by any chance?’

‘Nice try, sir. His name is Slavc. I don’t know his surname.’

The director stared at him again. ‘You know him? Well, that can wait. I was horrified, of course, but now I knew there were actual werewolves involved, I didn’t know how to proceed. And it seems your girlfriend beat me to it. How did you do it, both of you?’

‘Well, sir, I’m still not sure whether I can trust you. What if I tell you everything and you go straight to Wichtringhausen?’

‘Wouldn’t I have done that already? Once I knew about the sting? All right, I admit I can’t prove that I won’t. But tell me – _are_ you a werewolf?

‘With all respect, sir, that _isn’t_ your business. You’ve read the company policy. Prying into employees’ private lives…’

‘I’d call it an undisclosed medical condition, Schultze.’

‘But not one that affects my ability to do my job,’ countered Motte, realising then that this was tantamount to an admission. ‘Okay, you win, sir. I was the first wolf man. I was very glad when Slavc turned up!’

‘Ye gods! You were taking a risk. You could have been torn apart! I think you’d better tell me the whole story.’

So Motte told him how Lina had phoned him, how they’d planned for him to get caught as a wolf and change back when he saw an opportunity, how he’d got the phone – ‘I think that’s how she got a handle on the slave ships, as you call them. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

‘After I sent Frau Herrmann a text, we – there were three of us wolves in the pen – had to keep the men from the phone until she arrived. We drove them back out of the pen a couple of times, but eventually they drew us out, and we were fighting in the farmyard when she arrived. Just in time. We overpowered the men, but she hadn’t brought anything to tie them up with. She used the elastic from her coat, and they got free when she was searching the farmhouse. Just as well I’d already shown her the phone.

‘Anyway, the men got free and I was shot with a tranquilliser dart. Again. They bundled me into their van and took me to the arena. The other two wolves escaped; Slavc had the sense to follow Frau Herrmann’s scent to her car. But she’d somehow got a tracking device onto their van, so she and Slavc came to the arena and rescued me.’ Motte carefully didn’t mention the Schielmanns, nor the Australian werewolf group. He still wasn’t sure how far he could trust his boss.

The director had been listening, quietly, as Motte told his story. Finally he said, ‘You’re still not telling me what you did with Slavc – and you haven’t even mentioned the berserker. Never mind. I still don’t know whether you deserve a medal for bravery, or the sack for rashness. Can I really employ you to give me careful assessments of risk when I know you go on sprees like that?’

Motte said nothing. After a pause, the director continued, ‘To think I sent you all the way to Thailand to look for dodgy employment practices, and Wichtringhausen was using slaves here in Europe. I’d been trying for over a year to find out what was wrong with his outfit, and you did it in a month. Well done. I can’t arrange a medal, I’m afraid, but I can give you a bonus. Don’t spend it all on rehabilitating rescued werewolves!’

*

It was another month before Lina next visited Frankfurt. They met again at the Schielmanns’, where Ulrich – as he was now learning to call himself – and Slavc were now settling in. Lina brought the news that a contact in Russia had visited the (now repatriated) werewolf from the slave ship, as they were now all calling it, and had come up with some arrangement for him to spend a night a month in an appropriate place.

After a relaxed evening together, as they turned to go, Motte said, ‘Lina?’

‘What is it?’

‘I just wondered … er … there’s a small theatre near my flat where they’re showing some silent films from a hundred years ago, with a live orchestra for music. They usually do a double bill – one film with the original score, if they can find it, and the other with a brand new score. I’ve got some tickets for Friday night. Are you interested? I mean, it’s not as though we’ve not been out to see films together before!’

Lina was, apparently, taken by surprise by this invitation. Eventually she said, ‘All right. Let’s go and see a film or two. As long as we don’t take the short cut under the U-Bahn afterwards!’

**Author's Note:**

> Temple Cloud and I discovered Catherine Jinks just a couple of months ago - a copy of Abused Werewolf Rescue Group on a charity book stall. Twilight-style cover and Eva-Ibbotson-style title? It had to be worth a try. We really enjoyed it, and even before we'd finished reading it I knew I had to write this fan-fic! I've never written fan-fic before, so this was a new experience for me.
> 
> The first five or six chapters came quite quickly; after that, I kept adding another chapter and finding myself no closer to the end. In chapter ten, I started writing a scene in which Motte confronted his boss about the fights, and ended up leaving his job. But this didn't work in character. Only when I realised that the boss _wasn't_ complicit in the fighting did I discover what actually happened.
> 
> This is set in the late 20-teens, so twenty-some years after _Kleine Werwolf_ and maybe eight after _Rescue Group_. So Motte and Lina are grown up, Dr Schielmann and Frau Pruschke are married, and Fr Alvarez is retired.
> 
> Kleiner Werwolf exists in English translation (Young Werewolf) with a hero called Matt, but I haven't read this, so the characters, setting and names are drawn from the German original. Original Character surnames are based on German place names.
> 
> [Slavc rerally exists.](https://www.theguardian.com/science/animal-magic/2014/aug/08/slavc-wolf-migration-europe) In real life he is not a human, but he seems to have had the same desire to see the world. He now lives (or maybe not - he must be eleven!) in Italy with a local female, with whom he has had at least two litters of cubs. Lina's tracking device for the van was inspired by Slavc's collar.


End file.
